The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

It was well below zero in Moscow that day. The protesters at Bolotnaya Square still came out, and the "anti-orange" demonstrators were bused in, but the speeches had to be kept short. Still, Dugin's two-minute statement hit the main points of the ideology he was proposing: Russia is great and it is all that stands between the world as we know it and the Global States of America. It contained the "worshipping of the past" that Fromm had believed to be key to fascist ideology. By calling the imagined American empire "evil" (casually reversing Ronald Reagan's usage), the speech hinted at Russia's unique goodness. This idea was expressed more clearly in a document Dugin cosigned a few days later with a dozen other high- profile men, called the "Anti-Orange Pact." It began:

We are united in our understanding of the need to resist the attack of the Orange, who are targeting our common fundamental

values.²⁹

The word "values" was new, and it was key. The fledgling ideology now had all its components: the nation, the past, traditional values, an external threat, and a fifth column.

dugin's proposed frame fit the crackdown, uniting the arrests, the "foreign agents" law, and the new, communally enforced censorship. It was all in the name of rooting out the fifth column and protecting Russian values. It stood to reason that Pussy Riot, who embodied both the fifth column and an apparent disrespect for traditional Russian values, were the first people sentenced to imprisonment in the crackdown. They had been arrested for protest but tried, in effect, for blasphemy. Court testimony centered on whether they had crossed themselves properly and how much skin they had exposed in church. There was some discussion of whether they were possessed.

Here the state described by Magyar met the society described by Gudkov. When the state used force and ideology as mere tools, society responded as it had over the course of previous generations to both force and ideology: by mobilizing. Russia had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society.

"Abortive modernization" continued as more and more people were arrested in the Bolotnoye case. These arrests served the same purpose as selective arrests had in the Soviet Union: they issued a warning. Bolotnoye inmates seemed chosen almost at random. None was a protest leader, and most, in fact, were less known, even in protest circles, than Masha. This communicated the message that protest was risky for the rank and file. As always happens in cases of apparently random arrests, people tried to discern their logic. A common belief took hold that people who had been detained during other protests, and those who had been captured on video from the Bolotnaya riots, were the ones targeted. A number of young activists fled the country, seeking haven in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and countries like Sweden and Finland. Still, there were hundreds of people with records of police detentions, and hundreds who had been captured on Bolotnaya video, and most of them were not arrested. That is how terror works: the threat must be credible yet unpredictable.

Protest leaders also needed to be neutralized. Here the Kremlin was cautious, perhaps weary of causing more protest by pushing too hard. Udaltsov was placed under house arrest. The terms of his confinement prevented him from communicating with anyone other than his household members, and from using the Internet. Yet, unlike several dozen lesser-known activists, he had the luxury of sleeping on sheets, sharing a bed with his wife. Few people could be roused to protest the treatment of Udaltsov. After more than a year, when Udaltsov had reliably faded from public view, he was convicted of organizing a riot and sentenced to four and a half years behind bars.³⁰

Kasparov was pressured to emigrate—or face persecution; he moved to New York City. Nemtsov received a barrage of death threats. Navalny became a defendant in a bizarre embezzlement case.

He was accused of having used his position as an unpaid consultant to the liberal governor of the Kirov region to arrange to

steal huge quantities of timber from the region's state-run forestry company, causing half a million dollars in losses.* The charges were similar to those lodged against Khodorkovsky when he went up for trial the second time—he was convicted of stealing crude oil from his own company. Navalny was also accused of doing something both impossible and absurd. The state could not even produce evidence that the money ever went missing. But on July 18, 2013, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.